


Taking the Edge Off

by TheNordicAlien



Category: Choices: Stories You Play, Endless Summer (Visual Novel), PlayChoices
Genre: F/M, Food, Future Fic, Implied Sexual Content, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:08:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12021039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNordicAlien/pseuds/TheNordicAlien
Summary: Years after leaving the island, Michelle has to deal with the much more prosaic problems of grandparental expectations, but her worries are soothed by the last man she expected to fall in love with - and the one she can't live without. Written as part of the Tumblr Choices Creates Carnival - prompt: Kitchen.





	Taking the Edge Off

**Prompt: Kitchen**  
**Rating: T**  
**No trigger warnings**

*

She doesn’t like kitchens. She sometimes wishes she did, but she doesn’t.

She likes operating rooms.

All her life, there’s been that push-and-pull inside her. It’s part of growing up caught between two cultures, she guesses. She was always determined to be the best, the smartest, the top of the class. Not the first in her family to graduate college; no, her older cousin did that. But the first to graduate medical school! The first to be accepted to a neuro residency at Johns Hopkins! Pretty damn good for someone whose mother landed on a California beach in the 70s with nothing but the clothes on her back.

Mom was always so proud of her. Her biggest cheerleader. No matter how many extra hours she had to take on at work, she always managed to find the time and the money to support Michelle and urge her to become the best she can be. She stands at the scrub sink, smiling as the memories flicker past her eyes. The first time she won her elementary school spelling bee…and Mom there with the neighbor’s video camera, catching it all on tape. Her thirteenth birthday, sitting in the Wishing Chair in Smith Tower, wishing for the whole world…and Mom shaking her head and saying she didn’t need to make a wish for herself, because Michelle was everything a mother could want. The time she was elected student body president while only a junior in high school…and the celebratory dinner at Andaluca, the dinner that Michelle only realized years later had probably cost the best part of a week’s salary.

Mom had always supported her. Always pushed her to follow her dreams.

And for what? So that, the moment she makes head of neurosurgery, her grandparents can start hassling her about finally settling down, about marrying a nice boy and putting the career on the back burner while she stays at home raising children and cooking _com tay cam?_

Hell no. Michelle doesn’t do kitchens.

But she loves her grandparents almost as much as she loves Mom. And… _more_ than she loves her career?

She just doesn’t know the answer to that.

She dries off her hands, a little ruefully. She just lost track of time and spent twice as long scrubbing out as she needed to, and wouldn’t _that_ amuse the interns, to know that even the great Michelle Nguyen loses focus sometimes? She loves her job; loves being the best in her field, but sometimes the pressure to project that image of perfection at all times…it gets tiring.

Time to go home, then. Even a Type A superwoman needs somewhere she can go to unwind, where she doesn’t have to worry about being impressive.

The drive is short at this time of night. Fifteen minutes from hospital lobby to apartment foyer. She’s smiling again even before she opens the door, and as she steps inside, most of the stress from her day leaves her, because everything in her apartment, from the plush cream carpet to the low lighting to the divine smells wafting into the hall, whispers to her _relax, you’re home safe._

“Meesh? I’m in the kitchen.”

And there he is. Larger than life, but not in a superhero way. No, Raj isn’t the Captain-America golden boy overachiever she always would have imagined herself with. He’s as low-key warm and soothing as her favorite robe, as a cup of hot tea on a rainy day. He’s calm and kind and honest and _real,_ and her highly-strung, sharp-edged personality smooths out and relaxes in his presence in a way she’s never been able to with other men. She stands there watching him for several minutes, never realizing that her eyes have changed from cold topaz to gooey caramel, or that he can see her softened gaze reflected in the back of the cooker.

Finally, he turns around. “Hey, Superbrain. Great timing. Dinner in twenty, so you’ve got time to shower. I’m using you as a guinea pig tonight for a new recipe I’m hoping to put in the next book. You’ll love it.”

She kisses him hard and heads into the shower to wash away the last remnants of the day’s tension.

*

Twenty minutes later, she’s barefaced and barefoot, wearing only a fleecy bathrobe as she licks red sauce off her fingers.

She loves kitchens when he’s in them.

“That was amazing,” she tells him. “I can taste the garlic and tomato, but where does the heat come from? It’s not chilli, I don’t think.”

“Turmeric and mustard powder. I call it Chicken Sudarshan.”

“What’s Sudarshan mean?”

He laughs. “Sudarshan is my grandmother. She’s the one who taught me to make it. I just tweaked it a bit for the cookbook.”

She frowns, remembering the letter she opened this morning. The aggravation at her grandma’s well-intentioned questions about her love life, and the guilt she felt when she realized that she hasn’t been home to visit for nearly a year.

“You’re really close to your grandma, right?”

“I’m close to all of them. Family’s important. There’s nobody else who’ll be there for you through the tough times, nobody who supports you more or loves you more than your family.”

She nods slowly to herself, as though she’s finally worked out a problem she’s been wrestling with. “Will you come to Washington with me next week, and meet my mom and my grandparents?”

His big head tilts to the side, and a grin the size of a watermelon slice spreads over his face. “Are you sure you’re ready for that? It’s only been three years.”

“Oh, shut up.” She punches him in the arm, and then absently rubs it better. “Anyway, it’s been more than a decade. I think I fell in love with you back on the island. I just didn’t know it then.”

“Was it my insatiable love of life and my endless capacity for rum?”

“Actually, it was the night you cooked the feast to stop us all fighting.”

He looks triumphant. “I knew it! You fell in love with me for my cooking skills. I knew it all along.” His laughter is infectious, and she thinks that she’ll let him have this one, and wait for another day to tell him that it was actually the different cocktails he made each of them, and his speech about embracing everyone’s unique qualities, that made her realize that her happiness lay not with a man who was her male counterpart, but with someone who was easygoing where she was hyperactive, fun-loving where she was driven, giving where she was selfish. A man who would coax her into bed for a couple hours’ sleep when she tried to stay up all night studying, who would feed her and make a cozy home for her while she worked to save lives and pay the bills, who would teach her how to see her patients as human beings rather than just surgical cases.

He has taught her so much - how to laugh, how to love - but she isn’t _quite_ there yet with the trust. She doesn’t realize that when she leans over to kiss him, her eyes are full of both love and uncertainty. But he sees it, and knows he can’t tease her any more.

“I’d be honored to meet your mom and your grandparents, love.”

After all she’s done for him - after the holidays spent alone without complaint when he was working at the restaurant, after the encouragement she gave him and the drive she helped him find when he mentioned wanting to write his own cookbooks, after the nine months where she supported him financially while he was writing the first book - flying across the country is the least he can do. And hell, maybe her grandparents will be satisfied if she has a husband-to-be who’s happy to do the cooking and baby-raising. She thinks she hides her worries from him, but he knows that every time one of those letters with the elegant curly handwriting arrives, she’ll be extra tense for days after. He makes sure to create something particularly tasty and comforting on those days.

He bends to kiss her, and nibbles on her earlobe while he murmurs the words she’s been hoping to hear all night. “Speaking of my endless capacity for rum…I made a dark rum cake for dessert.”

*

An hour later, the night is rolling on toward dawn, and they’re snuggled together in their kingsize bed, his chef’s belly fitting perfectly into the small of her back. He loves how easily she curls into him, how this amazingly strong, capable woman allows him to protect her while she sleeps. She’s half asleep now, and muttering seemingly random thoughts the way she always does in a hypnagogic state.

“Back then…didn’t even know you _liked_ women. Or men. Or anyone.”

“I always liked women. I just didn’t date many. They disturbed my _shanti._ My inner peace.”

“Even me?”

He smiles against the top of her head. “Especially you, Meesh.”

“And now?”

“Now, you share my peace with me.”

She sleeps, satisfied.

**Author's Note:**

> We don’t know much about Michelle’s background, except that her Rourke file says she was raised by a single mother. Given that the ES characters all have dates of birth in the mid 1990s, I thought the timing would be right for her mother (as a child or pre-teen) and her grandparents to have been boat people in the 1978-79 exodus from Vietnam. It might also give a reason for Michelle’s drive to succeed, though of course not every personality trait needs to be pathologized, and it’s totally possible that it’s just who she _is._
> 
> _Com tay cam_ is a Vietnamese dish of chicken and vegetables and rice cooked in a clay pot. It’s extremely tasty, and something her mother and grandmother might well have cooked.
> 
> The Wishing Chair is an elaborately carved chair that sits in the Chinese Room on the 35th floor of Smith Tower in Seattle. Legend has it that if unmarried people sit in the chair, they’ll be married within the year. I’ve never heard of anyone sitting in the Wishing Chair to wish for something other than marriage, but Michelle has always seemed like the type who’d wish for everything she wanted and then make it happen through sheer willpower.
> 
> Andaluca is a restaurant in Seattle. I haven’t eaten there and therefore feel a little odd including it, but I needed a restaurant name, and online reviews were extremely favorable. If any readers can confirm this for me, I’d be grateful.
> 
> Chicken Sudarshan is a real dish that my mother got from an Indian friend named Sudarshan decades ago - though that’s not its real name; Mom named it after the friend who gave it to her - and it’s delicious. I’ll try and find the recipe, if I can lay my hands on Mom’s old recipe books. Sudarshan is actually a masculine name - according to the internet at least - but Mom’s friend was a woman, and it’s certainly not unheard for Indian names to cross genders. I have several female friends with traditionally masculine Indian names, so I let it stay in its original form.
> 
> I am not of either Indian or Vietnamese descent, and while I did run this past friends who are, it was done speedily, so any errors - cultural or otherwise - are mine and mine alone. If you spot anything particularly egregious, please do let me know. I try to be as accurate as possible when writing, but I find that somewhat difficult when working with characters whose backgrounds are very different to my own.


End file.
